Monday, April 7, 2008

Chessquick

I like blogger in comparison to livejournal. It is annoying to read long entries on livejournal. I am ok with reading long entries here. I like writing long entries.

I have a novella in the new Bizarro Starter Kit (Blue). It is called Cheesequake Smash-up. Cheesequake is a town in New Jersey. It is my favorite name for a town.

I forget until now: Someone, I think Carlton Mellick at the horror convention, told me that it is not pronounced Cheese Quake. It is pronounced Chess Quick. This disappoints me greatly.

I finished 665 words (the neighbor of the beast) of my story today. It is decent so far. It was not fun like I like writing to be. It was work.

My writing recently has been fun, whereas it used to be torturous. Although I like what results from the torture more, but the fun is more accessible to readers, so I think I will mostly try to stick with the fun.

But the editors of the anthology are familiar with my old style of writing and invited me to submit, so I am trying to write something resembling my old stuff. I think I am failing a little, but I am ok with this.

Working on this story today was like being at work for six hours and having to deal with a line of non-stop customers with frequent procrastination breaks. I guess the procrastination breaks would entail the customers occasionally saying really crazy things to me which entertain me greatly. Like the man-dwarf from the other night with the little, creepy hands that was telling me how he likes goth music and wearing a pentagram around his neck. Thank god for these little moments.

The writing started to go by quickly and I started to enjoy it near the end, but then I started to feel tired. Isn't that always the way it works?

I wrote up to the point in the story where the protagonist (Alex Trebek animatron gone wigger) meets Stagger Lee. Stagger Lee is a fascinating character. He was a real person. He was a black man. He killed his white buddy in a bar in 1895. Since then, he has become a character of folklore. A song was written about him. There have been many many many different variations of this song. The murder was a pretty minor incident as murders go, but "Stagger Lee has become an archetype, the embodiment of a tough-guy black man -- one who is sly, streetwise, cool, lawless, amoral, potentially violent, and who defies often white authority."

I put that in quotations because I stole it from Wikipedia.

I think it may end up being some commentary on race relations or something. I don't know. Or maybe I just think it's funny to have a wigger trying to buddy up with a guy like Stagger Lee.

Nick Cave didn't actually write the lyrics in his version of the song. I always assumed that he did. It was written by a bunch of black prisoners. We will probably never know their names. That makes sense since the lyrics are kind of hip hop-y and Nick Cave is not hip hop-y.

I chose to base my story on Stagger Lee because the book is a horror anthology and I do not really write horror. But the song is about a killing spree, so I already have the horrific subject matter there. I don't have to put any extra effort into making it a horror story, I hope.

I think I will take a break from the story for the next few days and work on outlining my novella. I worked on it once in Utah, but didn't do very much besides character profile stuff. And ever since I got home, my psyche has been too crazy to get any writing work done until today.

The housing situation isn't looking nearly so dire because I've found a few places through Craig's list where the people either have common interests with me or friends in common. Maybe we will click. People move out of my house all the time and whenever I did roommate interviews, I usually ended up picking some random who I had nothing in common with because everybody nearly everybody was a random asshole who I have nothing in common with. So hopefully I will stand out from the horde because the stuff that I have in common with the people who are looking to fill a room.

I think that after my next book (which I will probably write a second novella for besides the one that I am working on now), I will probably write a memoir-thing. I will probably use a pen name so I don't feel restricted about what I wrote about. I guess it will kind of be like some of these blog entries, the ones that I write about my past. I don't really feel restricted in my blogging, but there are some things that I want to write about that I feel like I can't write about.

But sometimes I feel a little paranoid about the content and titles of my fiction. Will a job refuse to hire me because I wrote a novel called It Came from Below the Belt? Or will it be because of the subject matter? Or will someone not rent me a room because of this? Or will an MFA program reject me because of this? I feel a lot more paranoid now in comparison to when I started this paragraph. Maybe I fucked up by not using a pen name from the very start? Oh well. It's too late now.

I think I will apply to the Juniper Summer Writing program at the University of Massachusetts. I was just reminded about it today. It is near me. It is for a week. Hopefully it is not too late to apply. I will call them now and find out.

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About Me

I wrote It Came from Below the Belt, My Heart Said No, But the Camera Crew Said Yes!, Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy, and Rico Slade Will Fucking Kill You. I edit a literary journal called Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens. I like cheese. I am lactose intolerant.